This invention relates to valve control apparatus for use in rotary engines.
For some time there has been an interest in finding practical alternatives to the standard reciprocating internal combustion engines with much of this interest being focused on rotary engine research and development. Various types of rotary engines have been proposed which depart from the conventional cylinder/piston arrangement, such as the well known Wankel engine, and engines which utilize a cylinder/piston arrangement in an unconventional way, such as the engine disclosed in A. Z. Richards, Jr., U.S. Pat. No. 2,683,422. The latter type engine includes a cylinder unit or block having a plurality of cylinders radially arranged about an axis about which the block rotates. Pistons are disposed to move within the cylinders and also to rotate about a second axis offset from the first mentioned axis.
Because the cylinder block rotates in the Richards type engine, the usual valve actuating cam structure used in standard reciprocating engines is simply not suitable for use in the Richards type engine. Suggestions have been made for eliminating valve arrangements which require mounting valves in the cylinders to move between open and closed positions and to provide instead some type of structure in which openings in the cylinder walls alternately move into alignment first with stationary inlet openings and then with stationary outlet openings to respectively receive fuel charges and then discharge products of combustion. See for example U.S. Pat. No. 3,730,148. However, it is oftentimes difficult with these arrangements to provide an adequate seal for the cylinder openings and this gives rise to a loss of power.